


Y is for Annual Physical

by ivorygates



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alphabet Soup Challenge, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-13
Updated: 2014-02-13
Packaged: 2018-01-12 06:20:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1182901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The military makes a different kind of sense than what Daniel is used to.</p>
<p>Set somewhere in the first three seasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Y is for Annual Physical

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2014 On-World Alphabet Soup Challenge. (Yeah, I know it's supposed to be "Y is for Yearly Physical". Trust me, it makes less sense this way.)

“If we just had a physical three months ago—which we did—why are we having another one now?”

“That was a quarterly physical, Daniel. This is an annual physical.”

“‘Annual’ implies ‘yearly.’ As in: ‘once every twelve months,’” Daniel protested.

“And amazingly, this time last year, here we were.”

The two of them were sitting side by side on a bench in a waiting room in their underwear. Teal’c always took up a lot of the docs’ time, and while Carter got the same treatment he and Daniel did (more or less), the Air Force in its infinite wisdom had decided long ago that these exciting bonding sessions weren’t meant to be co-ed. Maybe it was the underwear thing. In which case, Jack was very very worried about the medical department’s grasp of a Gate Team’s average working day.

“But we were also here three months ago,” Daniel pointed out.

“Which was a quarterly physical,” Jack said.

Yearly physicals were standard: he’d endured them since he’d joined the Air Force. In addition to determining that you weren’t about to die suddenly (and therefore cost the Air Force a great deal of money), it also assessed mystical qualities like “preparedness”. Preparedness meant lying to someone up the chain of command about your work life, your home life, your marriage (where applicable), and your one hundred percent lack of nightmares, stress, and second thoughts about any subject whatsoever. In the good old days, passing an eval meant one more step up the ladder of promotion. Good assignments. Shiny toys. The chance to participate in (and cause) really spectacular explosions. He’d always known he’d never make General (combat track or not), and he’d actually been surprised to make Full Bird. (He’d told Sarah he’d get out after that, if he had his twenty, but there’d been one more thing, and one more thing, and then it didn’t matter any more.)

“Which implies that this...is also a quarterly physical?” Daniel suggests.

“If it was a quarterly physical, Daniel, they’d call it a quarterly physical.”

Operation Giza had meant a day-long physical before he and his team left on their suicide mission. (Daniel hadn’t been included that time, even though he’d bought a ticket on that particular pleasure cruise: he was too irreplaceable to downcheck on physical grounds, and Jack suspects West and Katie Langford figured Dr. Jackson would kill all germs in his vicinity with the power of his brain.) It had been a month-long physical when he, Kawalsky, and Ferretti came limping home. Everybody wanting to figure out if anything had really changed when the Air Force White Elephant turned them all into energy and squirted them across the universe. Twice. (West never did stop bitching about them not recovering the MIT Probe; he’d said it was worth all of them put together. West had always been a charmer.)

“So why don’t they call it a quarterly physical, Jack?”

He sighs and stops concentrating on the crack in the opposite wall. He brought a yo-yo with him to pass the time, but the docs took it away along with his clothes; the military believes that boredom builds character. He’s cold and his knees hurt and he hates being barefoot. Probably about as much as Daniel hates what he considers pointless bureaucracy, which explains all the bitching. Daniel isn’t military. Daniel doesn’t understand that half of this stuff is secret mind control and the other half is ritual, and it all goes together to cover up the fact that it takes a lot of training to replace a civilian with a soldier. (Of course, if he did understand, he’d think it was a stupid idea, but Daniel’s never fired a shot that he hasn’t fired in anger.)

“Because if they called it a quarterly physical, Daniel, it would be a quarterly physical. And that would mean we still had to have an annual physical. And that would be three more days of my life that I would never get back.”

In fact, there isn’t much difference between the two in terms of hamster mazes and exercise wheels (and clueless chats with MacKenzie). But Jack knows that the yearly results find their way to his jacket, and the quarterly ones just vanish into the same place his after-action reports do. Quantity over quality. It’s the military way. That, and the forlorn hope that somewhere in all that mass of information might be the facts they’re looking for, because what it all boils down to is this: they’re using a piece of equipment built and designed by aliens to go running around the galaxy on the most important treasure-hunt _ever_ , and it’s not so much because they figured out how to make it work (he’s sure MIT has a lot of probe droids it isn’t using) as because a whole galaxy full of bloodthirsty aliens (who don’t like us, by the way, Daniel, as you’ve probably noticed) know they’re here (and sitting ducks, if they have ducks). Nobody in Washington knows why the _Goa’uld_ haven’t come calling yet, but they’re all really clear on one thing: when they do show up, Earth had better be in a position to blow them out of the sky.

So they’re using the Stargate. And they’re trying to figure out what it does at the same time. And that means gathering information however they can. (He thinks of little Doc Frasier: if the woman doesn’t drink, it’s beyond belief.)

“Why would they do _five_ quarterly physicals in a year?” Daniel asks. “The word ‘quarter’ comes from the Latin _quartārius,_ a fourth. You can’t have five fourths of anything.”

“You’ve been working here how long?” Jack asks, and is rewarded with a faintly-amused grumble.

“I just want things to make sense,” Daniel replies.

“Life doesn’t make sense,” Jack says.

“It does,” Daniel says stubbornly. “It can.”

Daniel is younger than he is in so many more ways than just a twelve-year gap between the dates on their birth certificates. Daniel retains the optimism of youth: questions have answers; problems have solutions. Jack has never quite been able to bring himself to quash that completely, even when it makes him want to bang his head repeatedly against the nearest wall.

“If life made sense, we would not be sitting in a refrigerator in our underwear waiting to go jogging on a treadmill so they can tell us our blood pressure’s too high.”

“Do you think they care?” Daniel asks, after a pause. “What the results are, I mean?”

There’s a new note in his voice now. Not just bitching-for-the-sake-of-it. The kind of voice you use when you’re wondering if it’s all worth it.

_“You don’t expect to stay alive,” his first CO said. “You’d better not. All you can hope for is that when you die, it’s worth it.”_

This isn’t a philosophy he’s going to share with Daniel, the idea that his life is something for somebody else to spend and all you can do is hope they get a good price. It’s the unspoken truth of life in a combat unit: Jack would rather not either have another round of Military Versus Civilians or find out that Daniel’s gotten to the point where he understands it.

“Depends on what you mean,” Jack says. “They’re probably hoping that if they do enough tests, the results will make sense to somebody someday.”

The door opens. A white-coated orderly beckons. They get to their feet.

“For science,” Daniel says, sounding more cheerful.

“Yeah. Science.”

_"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."_

Oppenheimer was a scientist, too.

#


End file.
